There are plenty of choices on the market today for keyword research. No matter your budget, there are probably several options to choose from. In our "Discussion of the Week," we want to know what KR tool(s) you prefer at the moment, and why. Do you use different KR tools for different types of projects/research? Share your thoughts below, but let's not turn it into a promotional link-fest. Just let us know what your favorite keyword tools are and why. The floor is open!9 Comments

I use the Google Keyword Tool in combination with a spreadsheet or the keyword tool from my Wealthy Affiliate membership if I wanted to quickly see my article competition (I'm mostly into article marketing). Also use Micro Niche Finder when I'm working on my own laptop, again because it's faster to determine your competition than simply using Google's tool.

Joined Jaaxy about two days to see how that compares to the other tools I use. So far I like it. Easy to learn, dig down to find more keywords, determine strength of competition, create lists, brainstorm, find affiliate programs,... Think this could be my new favorite depending on how reliable it stays in the future.

My favorite keyword research tool is SEOmoz's Keyword Analysis tool. It's not like most keyword research tools in that it's not really built to help you discover new keywords or determine search volume. But once you have your target keywords picked out and you want to figure out what it's going to take to rank for those keywords, no tool helps more with analyzing the competition you're facing.

It breaks down the first page SERP for the keyword(s) you input, showing you how each website stacks up against each other. In a clean, easy to navigate format, you can see how each website on the SERP compares in terms of both link metrics and on-page factors. In my opinion, it's the best way to quickly and accurately evaluate the difficulty of a keyword.

You really can't rely on the AdWords difficulty score or any kind of third-party company to provide you with some magical number that measures the difficulty of a keyword. If you're like me, you want to check it out for yourself. You want to sort through the top websites, check out their backlinks, see whether you're facing amateur webmasters or experienced SEOs for control of the SERP. In short, you want to get your hands dirty. SEOmoz seems to understand that. They give you a difficulty score, if you're into that kind of thing, but then they give you everything you need to really understand where that score is coming from.

While I like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool I usually use Google Related Searches to create some wider sets of source terms and then use Google Refine to help me better locate keyword modifier classes.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker, combined in Excel docs with the API of SEOmoz' OSE :) I used to use more than 10 tools about an year ago, but I was getting overstuffed with info and confised in the end of the research. But I changed my way of researching KWDs and found what works best for me atm.

I use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, although I use it iteratively: input a few keywords into the Tool, download a list of suggested terms, then refine that list a bit using sort/filter in Excel. I'll then plug that refined list back into the Tool, and see if any other ideas emerge.

Forgot to mention I also use Keyword Snatcher. It takes data from google, yahoo, bing, ask and amazon auto suggestion. Doesn't give you traffic numbers, only the popularity of each keyword per search engine. You can get a lot of long tail keywords with it that don't show up with google's keyword tool. The amazon search is why I love this tool so much as I promote a lot of physical products.